Your Narratives are shown in the Narratives tab in reverse chronological order, with the most recently changed Narratives first. After your Narratives, Narratives owned by others and shared with you are listed.

View Narrative history and revert to earlier versions

KBase stores a history of everything you’ve done to your Narrative, so if you want, you can revert changes and go back to an earlier version. When you hover your cursor over one of your Narratives in the Narratives panel, three icons will appear.

The first of these icons lets you expose the entire history of autosaves of your Narrative.

You can then, if you wish, choose an earlier version to revert to. This capability is still in the early phase of development and should become easier to use soon.

Add text to your Narrative

Adding text cells to your Narrative to explain what you were doing and what the results might mean will help others understand your computational experiments, as well as helping to remind you what you were doing. You can add formatted text to your Narrative in “Markdown Cells”. Markdown is a markup language (like, for example, HTML). It’s pretty easy to learn but does require knowing some syntax. A good “cheat sheet” for Markdown language can be found here.

You can add Markdown cells to a Narrative using the translucent blue buttons at the bottom right of the main Narrative panel. The button on the right is the “Add Markdown Cell” button and will add a Markdown cell under the currently selected Narrative cell.

(The >_ button adds a code cell, which is beyond the scope of this user guide. However, we will share one useful tip if you do want to try using a code cell: press Shift-Return in the cell to execute the code.)

Cell commands: move, delete, etc.

Via the arrows and menu items in a Narrative cell, you can move the cell up or down, collapse or expand it, show the code that runs the analysis, get more info about the app, or delete the app cell. The cell menu can be opened by clicking the “…” in the upper right corner of a cell.

Rename or delete a Narrative

To rename a Narrative, click on its name at the top of the Narrative window. A window will pop up to let you change the name.

If you decide to delete a Narrative that you own, click the trashcan icon. Delete with caution, because currently there’s no way to get your deleted Narrative back.

Advanced controls

The “Show Advanced Controls” option under the “Narratives” tab lets you “Set the Active Narrative for a Workspace”. (Workspace is an older term for a project–a collection of data and analyses.) You will probably not need to use this option, unless you are trying to retrieve old Narratives that you created in an old version of the Narrative Interface.

Save your work!

Although your Narrative is periodically autosaved, it’s always a good idea to save your work frequently, using the Save button at the top right of the screen.

Once you’re happy with your Narrative, you will probably want to share it with others. The next section describes how to do that.